The Key2 will thrill BlackBerry devotees with a great little keyboard and more privacy control than you'll get on other Android smartphones.

The BlackBerry Key2 ($649.99 unlocked) is like no other smartphone, and not just because it's the only mainstream model with a keyboard on the market. Its focus on privacy and security, as well as voice calling, puts it in a league of its own. Even though these smartphones aren't made by BlackBerry any more—they're made by TCL, which also makes Alcatel phones—they do share the brand's legacy of strengths and weaknesses. If you want messaging, security, and reliability, they're the ultimate choice. On the other hand, if you're looking for a great camera and a terrific multimedia experience, well…those have never been BlackBerry's strengths. For that, you'll want to turn to comparable (but keyboardless) models like the OnePlus 6.

All About the Keyboard

The Key2 is absolutely a BlackBerry, all the way up to the softly glowing notification LED at the top. Its solid, rectangular metal frame has no flex and feels sturdy, and the patterned matte back has good grip. It's well-balanced if you hold it right, with your thumbs on the keyboard and supporting fingers about halfway up the back of the device. At 5.96 by 2.83 by 0.33 inches (HWD) and 5.93 ounces, the phone feels big and solid, but not as bulky as the BlackBerry Priv.

There's a standard 3.5mm headset jack on top. The phone comes with an unusually comfortable pair of earbuds that do a good job of filling my ears and blocking outside noise. The USB-C port is on the bottom, and power and charging buttons are on the right hand side. There's also a "convenience key" on the side of the phone that you can set to launch anything you want, such as a favorite app or the quiet mode. The convenience key is ridged, so you can tell it apart from the power button by feel. There's a microSD card slot in with the nano-SIM card slot on the left side.

The 4.5-inch touch screen is not the phone's brightest feature. It's sharp, with a 1,620-by-1,080 resolution and 434 pixels per inch (ppi), but maximum brightness isn't very high, and it's extremely reflective.

The device is designed to be used in portrait mode. You can turn it sideways when you're using the camera, but using it at that angle is awkward. More annoyingly, games that require landscape mode (like some of the Japanese RPGs I like to play) are difficult to play because the phone isn't symmetrical when held sideways. It's a minor annoyance, but a genuine one.

Left to right: BlackBerry KeyOne, BlackBerry Key2

The QWERTY keyboard on the Key2 is closer to the one on the classic BlackBerry Bold than the BlackBerry KeyOne's was, even though it lacks the signature silver frets in between the key rows. The KeyOne's keys were made of sticky little plastic bubbles; the Key2's are bigger, angled, and matte. They're smooth and dry, easy for your fingers to glide over, and the angled tops give your fingertips some purchase. The space bar still doubles as a fast, accurate fingerprint sensor. This keyboard brings back the best tactile memories from the Torch 9800/Bold 9900 era.

The more you utilize the keyboard, the easier the Key2 is to use. Traditionally, BlackBerrys have had keyboard shortcuts; the KeyOne had 52 on its launch screen. The Key2 adds a special "Speed Key" in the lower right to easily access shortcuts. For example, you can press Speed Key-E to go to email from any other app, or Speed Key-W for Microsoft Word. It means, if you prefer, you never have to go back to the home screen.

The shortcuts aren't just for app launches: There are deep links to add a calendar event, jump to a specific Gmail inbox, and start a new Google doc. The keyboard is also capacitive, meaning you can swipe up, down, or sideways on it to scroll within the UI, but there's a little bit of tension that resembles using a touch-screen laptop.

With the keyboard being so functional, you quickly get used to performing actions like swiping to change between home screen pages. You can swipe in from the right side of the screen to access a "productivity tab," where you can access your calendar, messages, or tasks, but I found it easier to use the Speed Key shortcuts during my testing.

The bottom-ported speakerphone is another good example of BlackBerry thinking about its market. It's loud and clear when placed down on a table, because it's aimed directly at you, making it great for impromptu business calls. While not the loudest speakerphone we've tested, it's good enough.

Getting the Job Done

The Key2 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660, a high-midrange processor. Our 64GB unit has 50GB available, and you can use the microSD card slot for additional storage. Right now, we aren't seeing a lot of phones with benchmark scores like this one, which fit neatly between midrange devices like the Moto G6 and higher-end, Snapdragon 835- and 845-based models. With a PCMark score of 6,285, it's most similar to year-old leaders like the OnePlus 5 (6,600) or the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (6,866). Graphics benchmarks were uninspiring; the 11 frames per second on the GFXBench Car Crash test were a third of what we got on current leaders.

But, all that said, I didn't feel any sluggishness or slowdowns while testing this phone. The 6GB of RAM certainly helps.

On our video battery-rundown test, the Key2 lasted 5 hours, 58 minutes; that's shorter than devices with OLED screens like the Samsung Galaxy S9 (10+ hours), but I think it underestimates the generally power-sipping nature of the Key2's software. With a 3,500mAh battery, the phone lasted about two days in standby.

Usable on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks, the Key2 has LTE bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 17, 20, 28, 29, 30, and 66. That includes 14, the new AT&T "FirstNet" band for government employees, but not T-Mobile's Band 71 for rural coverage. Although it has Verizon's LTE frequency bands, a Verizon SIM card would not work in our device. Signal reception on the AT&T network was good, although without 4x4 MIMO, we expect it won't be quite as good as the Samsung Galaxy S9. LTE runs at category 11, 600Mbps speeds.

Wi-Fi reception is surprisingly good, considering that the 660 isn't Qualcomm's highest-spec chipset. On both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, the Key2 keeps pace with the Snapdragon 845-powered OnePlus 6.

Voice call quality is also very good. Earpiece sound is loud and clear, and transmission quality through the mic is excellent, with full noise cancellation that doesn't computerize or cut out my voice. On T-Mobile, you get voice-over-LTE with the high-quality EVS codec, which is very sharp. On AT&T, unfortunately, our unlocked Key2 model didn't have VoLTE. I couldn't activate Wi-Fi calling on either AT&T or T-Mobile. The phone has Bluetooth 5.0, which the KeyOne lacked. That should improve the sound quality and reliability of your Bluetooth headsets, as long as they also support Bluetooth 5.

Customized Oreo

The Key2 runs a heavily hacked version of Android 8.1 Oreo, but it doesn't feel gratuitous; the changes are designed to either enable keyboard features or improve device security. The alterations start with an un-rootable, un-alterable nature using a "hardware root of trust" to make sure the software on the device hasn't been changed.

TCL adds a bunch of custom apps, none of which are egregiously superfluous. DTEK does a security scan of your device that mostly functions to complain about your insecure screen lock, but more notably it lets you see all of the permissions that apps have requested, see how often the apps use those permissions, and turn off permissions you don't feel comfortable with. All Android phones have this power, but it's buried very deep in the settings. The Key2 makes permissions quick and easy to manage.

The phone's secure folder app is the best of its kind I've seen, in part because photos you've taken can be stored directly into the secure folder by tapping the fingerprint sensor in the camera app. It's a seamless way to keep your receipts, and any photos you might not want the world to see, safe from unwanted eyes, and prevents them from being uploaded to the cloud. The new Redactor app solves a surprisingly common problem: how to blank out personal information in screenshots. A power-management app lets you change apps' screen-usage settings, app by app. And there are device-wide search boxes everywhere.

There's a positive theme going on here: safe productivity. Using the Key2, I felt like my data wasn't about to slip out of my hands. I even started using Firefox Focus, the privacy-focused browser (in part because it's preloaded into the secure folder app).

BlackBerry has a good record for releasing monthly Android security updates. At this writing in July, the KeyOne is on the June 2018 security update. But because the phone's version of Android is so heavily altered, you can't count on platform version updates. The KeyOne is still running Android 7.1.1. TCL says it will update the Key2 to Android P, but not when. You can count on having a secure phone with a BlackBerry, but you can't count on having all of the features Google loads into Android.

Unimpressive Cameras

Where the Key2 founders is on its cameras, which feel much more midrange in practice than you would expect from this device's higher-end specs. The phone has a 12-megapixel, f/1.8 main camera; another 12-megapixel, f/2.6 "2x zoom" camera; and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera. The rear cameras can shoot video at up to 4K30; the front-facing camera captures 1080p at 30 frames per second.

As we found with the BlackBerry KeyOne, the cameras just aren't very good. The lack of optical image stabilization, and some really aggressive over-sharpening, means the Key2's cameras are dimmer and shots have more artifacts than on some of our favorite phones, like the Apple iPhone X and the OnePlus 6.

Outdoors or in good light, the Key2 captured strong colors in my testing, especially when using HDR. But subtle details looked smeared, even in some outdoors shots, because of aggressive post-processing. Low-light shots were dim, grainy, and noisy, especially when compared with a low-light star like the Samsung Galaxy S9+. The front-facing camera was surprisingly noisy, even outdoors.

The 2x zoom lens, I was shocked to see, didn't offer much in the way of additional sharpness. Photos looked noisy and digitally zoomed, which might have had to do with post-processing.

Videos suffered heavily from a lack of optical image stabilization. Mine tended to be jerky and bouncy, especially when I was taking them at 4K—you don't even get the limited electronic image stabilization at 4K, so get ready for a roller coaster ride. You don't typically get OIS in midrange phones, but it's practically de rigeur in $600+ devices.

When looking at the camera here, though, it's important to note that there aren't a lot of other phones in this $649 range. The Key2's camera compares favorably with midrange and lower phones like the Motorola G6—it just doesn't measure up to more expensive models.

Good for a Niche

The BlackBerry Key2 is unique, and it's going to thrill and fulfill its niche. If you appreciate having a physical keyboard, the Key2 is magic. The keyboard shortcuts make the experience personalized and customizable. The device is secure, and it's great for calling and messaging.

Media and gaming have been BlackBerry phones' weak points, and that holds true for the Key2. The camera isn't the greatest, and using the device in landscape mode can be awkward. You can get better performance, and a better camera, with the $529 OnePlus 6, although you lose the keyboard. We don't have an Editor's Choice in this price range, because the market share of $400 to $600 phones is so low, but the OnePlus 6 is our pick for the best performance in that price bracket.

Here's the thing, though: For the Key2, the keyboard is everything, and it's everything it needs to be. Should you upgrade from the KeyOne? I don't see the argument based on device performance, but the keyboard is a lot better here. While I can't quite give the Key2 an Editors' Choice award—I wish I could, but not with that camera at this price—I like it a lot, and anyone longing for the days of hardware keyboards won't be disappointed.

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About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

BlackBerry Key2

BlackBerry Key2

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